I wanted to pick everyone's brain a bit - how much source do you personally keep around in a ready to edit state? What's your storage solution like? I'm at the point where a single source I've been using is taking up nearly 2TB in UTVideo and I'm considering picking up a 12TB NAS so I can get over this for a while.

Ileia wrote:Only what I'm currently working on. I don't have enough space to keep any source around, it gets deleted once the video is done.

I actually did that for years, but recently got to a point where I had multiple ideas for the same show so it stuck around. UT @ 1080p is around 1GB/min, so it's adding up REALLY fast. If i was ever to work on more than 1 or 2 projects at a time, I don't think I'd have enough space.

I too only keep the sources I am working with in storage. Granted now that I've built my new computer, I have several projects saved and awaiting completion. But mostly, I only stick with just one or two sources total.

Most space I have is used up for non-amv related stuff thus I tend to not even keep a whole episode in lossless format. Basically I watch the anime, then pick the scene for the project and keep that plus like 1 sec before and after what I need. This process costs time, but saves space, time is money and space costs money, so it's a good trade-off imo <(^.^<)

My DVD/BD shelves are the best storage I have for footage. Beyond that, I have an 8TB JBOD on my main editing rig I use as storage for footage for my projects that wont fit on the SSDs I use for project scratch disks. Once I'm done with a source for a project, unless I have another project in mind for it, I delete the source to make room for the next. I don't edit in 1080p much and usually prefer to downscale my source to 720p. My most recent project I have 52 episodes at 720p in UTvideo and it's only 588 GB. That's still too large for my SSDs (I only have 256GB for that) so it sits on my 8TB local array.

I am in the process of obtaining the parts to build my own NAS using freeNAS and building a ZFS array of around 20+ TB. That's mainly for redundant storage of the things I collect like AMVs, but also to store some source as well. At the very least it'd give me enough extra space to move everything off my JBOD so I can convert it to a raid-5 at least for some small amount of redundancy on my local system.

I only keep lossless clips of the video(s) I'm working on at the moment. Generally, when I'm finished editing my video, the lossless files are deleted. The exception is when I feel that the lossless clips might be worth keeping around for a video in the future, but that rarely happens. I'm somewhat OCD about my hard drive space though...I don't like any of it to be taken up unnecessarily, and I like to keep it as clean as possible. I do this with games, too -- if I'm not going to be playing a game for a long time, I won't keep it on my hard drive.

External Hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper. Right now I have 1 TB external drive that I have had for years, a brand new 3 TB drive and my internal drive is 500 GB. Thinking about getting an internal 2 TB for larger projects. Have to see if it'll work with XP or not since that's what I'm still using for my editing computer. I personally save all my ripped DVD's so that way I don't have to spend time re-ripping them. I did that for years and it was a pain. If I have a source and I want to make another video with it again I want it easily accessable. So that's what I plan on doing.

Gene Starwind 21122 wrote:External Hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper. Right now I have 1 TB external drive that I have had for years, a brand new 3 TB drive and my internal drive is 500 GB. Thinking about getting an internal 2 TB for larger projects. Have to see if it'll work with XP or not since that's what I'm still using for my editing computer. I personally save all my ripped DVD's so that way I don't have to spend time re-ripping them. I did that for years and it was a pain. If I have a source and I want to make another video with it again I want it easily accessable. So that's what I plan on doing.

A 3 TB external drive at Walmart was only $119.

Between my main system and my file server i'm sitting on 13TB internal, an extra 6TB I need a new PCI SATA card before I can access, and another 7TB in externals reserved for other purposes. I've got the space covered for now - was just curious what people were doing with their HD footage.

I usually keep the original ripped episodes on the drive, as well as the LQ MJPEG copies, and only convert the relevant clips to HuffYUV for editing. Once the editing is done, I delete the MPEG-2s and MJPEG copies, convert the clips to FFV1 (was Lagarith for a long time, but FFV1 tends to be more reliable), pack them away in an archive with the rest of the project files and the scripts/d2v files, and burn the archive to a DVD-R. Then I get all of it off the drive.

Considering it all has to fit on an 80GB external, it's about the only thing I can do. I've yet to edit with Blu-ray sourced footage; I wouldn't be crazy enough to attempt that with this drive. The 160GB main drive is a no-go because between a tremendous backlog of media (mostly because I was stuck with a little 15" 1024x768 LCD for a few years), and having to allot the last ~30 GBs to the root/swap/home partitions for my Ubuntu install, I've got no space to really spare.

I have been thinking about going through another round of upgrades, though. Replacing the increasingly-flaky USB 2.0 card with a USB 3.0 card, replacing the ethernet card with a SATA card (and getting a USB ethernet adapter to pick up the slack there), replacing the main drive with a 2TB or 3TB drive and the DVD* drive with a Blu-ray burner (both of which would require the SATA card since this motherboard is too old to have any SATA support at all; same point with why I have a USB 2.0 card in this thing - it originally only supported USB 1.1).

*technically it was a DVD-RW drive, but it lost the ability to burn discs (and read most dual layer discs) years ago.